Quinlan opens up to himself

Alan Quinlan has fears about his imminent retirement, but after confronting depression, a more relaxed Quinlan will cope just fine.

There is a terror behind the dream of being a professional ballplayer. It comes as a slow realisation of finality and of the frightening unknowns which the end brings. When the playing is over, one can sense that one’s youth has been spent playing a game and now both the game and the youth are gone, along with the innocence that characterises all games which at root are pure and promote a prolonged adolescence in those who play. What is left is the other side of the Faustian bargain: to live all one’s days never able to recapture the feeling of those few years of intensified youth.

For the athlete who reaches 35, something in him dies; not a peripheral activity but a fundamental passion. He approaches the end of his playing days the way old people approach death. He puts his finances in order. He reminisces easily. He offers advice to the young. But the athlete differs from an old person in that he must continue living.

— Bill Bradley, former NBA player, Life on the Run

A SHORT while ago, a day like this would have torn him up. He’d have been cursing the world and cursing himself — “You clearly messed up, you clearly did something wrong” — because as he once put it, if you play rugby, you’re a rugby player; if you’re not playing rugby, then you’re not a rugby player — that simple.

These days he’s not quite as scathing or as simplistic as that. When we met during the week — a few days after he and his two-year-old son AJ led the team out against Connacht but a few days before Tony McGahan omitted him from the 27-man matchday squad for the Ospreys game — he didn’t know whether or not he was in the picture for today’s Magners League semi-final (He’s not). All he knew was that he’d pushed himself hard in training, that he still wanted to play for the team, that he still felt he could play for the team, that he had controlled as much as he could control, something which McGahan’s final selection fell beyond.

He hadn’t been just punching in over the last few months, he’d continued to be a pro, a rugby player, and that’s what he would remain on matchday, regardless of whether or not he was given a jersey.

He’s not going to pretend the last few months have been easy. He pulled a hamstring playing Ulster which cost him a starting place in the two Heineken Cup games against the Ospreys, and then shortly after coming on in those two games he dislocated his elbow, ruling him out of the final two games in Munster’s pool. Up to last Friday week’s honorary start against Connacht, he’d played 60 minutes since Christmas. Watching the others from the margins has been difficult but he’s coped with it and even tried to enjoy it.

“I’ve been pretty proud of the way I’ve gone about things this year. When I was injured I just tried to get back on the field as quick as I could and then when I came back I pushed myself and the lads as hard as I could. I’ve probably given out about some things because I’m by nature a bit of a moaner, but one thing (team psychologist) Gerry Hussey has said to me — just control what you can and no matter what happens, try and enjoy it. And in difficult circumstances I have kind of enjoyed it. It’s not that I’ve lost my desire to be on the team. I wouldn’t like to be someone to hang around and just take my wages; that’s one of the reasons it’s coming to an end now. But getting all stressed and beating myself up over not being picked and giving out to coaches and fighting with everybody; there’s no point. I’m just preparing and helping the team the best I can.”

He would still be, by his own admission, something of a worrier. He reads that passage of Bradley’s you brought along about the imminence and torment of retiring and nods. He asks if he can keep it — it articulates many of his fears. “The fear of not being able to play anymore, and being out in the real world, and I suppose of getting older as well. The realisation that I’ll miss the game so much, that it’s over and I can’t just go out on the pitch and express myself like I used to. Because it was just this release … It made me so happy to be in that zone on the field, in that battlefield. It would stimulate me so much. Like, how do I stimulate myself now? You know what I mean?”

He’s smiling as he says that though. Don’t worry; it’s not like he’s going back to chasing around Tipperary toting hatchets and baseball bats like he did one night as a wild youth when a row outside a chipper escalated into a running feud (this Compton-comes-to-Clanwilliam escapade is brilliantly described in his fine autobiography, Red-Blooded). A few years ago he might have struggled to cope with the loss of the game, the loss of that identity, but his mental health is much better now.

It comes down to talking. It really is good to talk. Alan Quinlan has faced numerous crossroads in his life and that’s the one thing he’s learned.

Back in 2000, Quinlan lost his place and lost his way with Munster. After playing well in the team’s six Heineken Cup pool games, his attitude and standards dropped alarmingly in the layoff before the quarter-finals, something Declan Kidney made no qualms about when they met over a coffee in his office in Cork that summer. It seemed as if Quinlan was content to just get by, do the minimum. He wasn’t disciplined. He was ‘Cheeky’ by nickname and by nature. After one pre-season game Quinlan, “not knowing any better”, flippantly threw a beer bottle into a hedge, in full view of Kidney. Eventually, after 20 minutes of Kidney’s appraisal, Quinlan welled up and opened up. “Help me. Help me.”

Their relationship instantly changed. “Declan understood me better,” Quinlan would write in his book. “I obviously had this macho reputation and a tough exterior but I was quite soft on the inside. He realised he didn’t always need to roar at me to get results and was more patient with me. He’d take time out to ask me how I was. He’d tell me to be more positive with myself… I have only one regret — that the meeting with Deccie hadn’t come sooner.”

Nine years later, Quinlan was again at a crossroads, again confessional, and again regretful that he hadn’t opened up far earlier. You know what brought him there. The eye-gouging incident with Leo Cullen, the suspension, missing out on the Lions tour. Quinlan’s mood spiralled all the way down to “the bottom of the barrel”, even fleetingly experiencing suicidal thoughts. That September, after confiding in members of the Munster backroom team, he met Dr Michael Horgan, the psychotherapist, and a further five times before that Christmas.

“I felt much better after it. It was like I was binning all these negative thoughts and experiences. I had been depressed during that whole episode, but I also saw it as an opportunity to analyse my whole life to see if I could come up with a different way to make myself a bit happier and find out why I’d be so hard on myself.”

So when he talked to Michael the biggest thing he discovered was how he had been talking to himself through the years. He was plagued with these limiting and defeating self-beliefs. Alright, so he was a warrior and athlete and all that, but he was also scatter-brained, wayward, his own worst enemy. If ever he did something right, it was either down to luck or talent, never because he had earned it, and even then he’d find a way to mess it up. Dougal, he’d sometimes call himself. You know that episode in Father Ted. They’re on a plane and Dougal sees this big red sign saying ‘Do Not Push!’, and of course he then presses it. Quinlan was like that with the self-destruction button, culminating in those 0.4 seconds of madness with Cullen. It wasn’t a conscious act, he meant nothing by it, but it was as if subconsciously he was finding a way to take away something he’d worked his whole career towards.

“I’d constantly have negative thoughts when a good thing would happen. I’d just have a feeling, ‘I’ll do something to mess it up anyway.’ Or if I got on a World Cup squad, I’d say, ‘I mightn’t get to start now but at least I’m on the squad’ rather than being positive and saying, ‘I’m going to set a goal now to play and I’m going to be the best player in my position.’” Maybe, if he was to delve really deep, it goes back to when he was trying to make the Tipperary U14 hurling team. He had grown up idolising and befriending Nicky English and making that team was something he had targeted. But when the club were hammered in the county final, he was overlooked. After that, he grew disillusioned with hurling, and while he mightn’t have known it, it was probably where he began putting limits on his expectations.

In many ways it was a wonderful, idyllic childhood growing up in a loving family in rural Tipperary with all the freedom it presented but in hindsight he didn’t open up enough to them and put far too much pressure on himself to grow up too quickly. From the time he was 12 he was constantly worried. “How am I going to get through school? What am I going to do when I finish school? How am I going to get a house?” As he’d reflect in his book, “At that age I should have been worrying about my class work. I got everything jumbled up. Maybe I was already feeling guilty that I wasn’t doing well enough at school, so instead of studying, I went looking for work. This need to work, to earn money, has been like a pressure cooker all my life.”

But at least now, after talking to Dr Horgan, he has the awareness to appreciate that, which has been hugely empowering. One time when he was 24 he went to a doctor and confided he was feeling down, but was basically told everyone gets a little stressed now and then. “I wish,” says Quinlan, “I’d been taken more seriously.

“There’s a bit of a stigma attached with men going to the doctor and asking for a bit of help or even opening up to friends and family members,” says Quinlan.

“It’s not the done thing in Ireland. But if you have a toothache you go to the dentist. Yet if you’re feeling low, people here tend not to talk about it. I was ‘well, I can solve all my own problems and look after myself.’ That’s not the way to do it. You have to reach out and ask for some help.”

That’s why he’s willingly promoting mental health awareness. Next Tuesday he’ll speak at the Radisson Hotel in Galway as part of the Lean On Me initiative, as well as the following Tuesday, down in Cork.

It’s also why he feels he’ll cope with his imminent retirement. Yes, he still experiences stressful thoughts but now he controls them rather than letting them control him.

He’s talked to other recently retired players like Malcolm O’Kelly who has thoroughly enjoyed his year away from the game, doing a bit of travelling and letting the body recuperate without the squeeze of the next match, the pressure of securing the next contract. “It’s a real business now, professional rugby,” says Quinlan. “You’re judged on what you do on the pitch, you get picked, you get dropped off teams and there’s a real anxiety to perform that comes with that. So one thing I’m hoping when I finish up is that it will relax me more and make me a less stressful person.”

Already he’s a far more organised one. In the past he’d find himself scurrying here and there and everywhere, off no schedule, just off the cuff. And he was constantly late, even for his own book launch, by 45 minutes, something Paul O’Connell noted. And so O’Connell did something about it, buying Quinlan another kind of book — a diary. Now he keeps a diary and pretty much sticks to it, blocking off half-days for some downtime for himself. Sometimes it’s to play golf. Sometimes it’s to catch a movie. Before his life would be too manic to read a book, with John Hayes slagging him that it would take Quinlan two years to finish one.

And, of course, there’s AJ, the light of his life. Quinlan and his wife Ruth split last year but in keeping with his new mindset, he looks at the positives of that reality, taking pride in how they’re still friends and how their marriage gave something as wonderful as AJ. Now his self-identity is no longer defined by rugby. First and foremost he’s a father, and this summer and for the rest of his life he wants to spend so much time with him.

He’ll be going to New Zealand to do some media work at the World Cup but beyond that he has no plans for the future, which is no harm because for too long he had too many concerns about the future. Maybe someday he’ll go back to college, an experience he sorely missed out on as a young man. Maybe he’ll go into coaching to maintain and reflect his love of the game, but it’s not something he’s going to rush into and spend this summer trying to recruit players. He’s slowing everything down, especially his thinking.

But, of course, he’ll miss the game. He’ll especially miss the dressing room. Bradley was right; playing team sport in many ways does prolong your adolescence. Other thirty-somethings don’t go around with dirty baby nappies in their gearbag like Quinlan was once classically set up by Mick Galwey. They don’t wind-up friends pretending they’re reporters, they don’t lock kitmen up in basket cases. Quinlan loved all that. He was central to all that. Between Doug Howlett signing for Munster and actually meeting the squad, Quinlan unashamedly resurrected the Kiwi’s embarrassing drunken dance on a couple of cars outside Heathrow, by spotting him watching Munster train when down to Limerick on a reccie and in his best traffic-cop voice declared, “PLEASE STEP AWAY FROM THE VEHICLES!” That was his way and the way of the dressing room. There was nothing sacred but nothing they wouldn’t do for each other either.

“There’s an unbelievable bond there. We’ve been through the mill together. We won, we lost together but we always stuck together. We’ve gotten to know each other as people as well as team-mates, and while soon they’ll no longer be teammates I can tell you they’ll remain lifelong friends.”

He’s also discovered another new lifelong friend. Himself. Before he’d berate himself. Now he talks gently, nicely. When he has got to play in recent years, he’s repeated the affirmations Gerry Hussey and himself drew up: “I can do this.” “I’m a good player.” “I’m a good person.” It’s something he repeats to himself, because it’s taken a long time to get the message through.

“Look, I don’t want people to think I’m some kind of victim or basket case. I’m not. I’m not someone who’s either up or down the whole time, I’m just someone who has being up and down and sometimes still gets a little blue and finds there’s nothing to be ashamed in that. I’ve accepted I can’t change what happened with the Lions. I can’t rewind the button.”

In his own time he’s now finding it too. Finally Alan Quinlan is giving himself a break.